run.

oh run, little girl, run for your life, run,

save your soul, free yourself,

body, bound in black chains of insanity

yes, this, this is insanity.


black fur, ivory claws—

—wild eyes, wild night,

tense muscles, running; no, flying across hard packed dirt

blurs and colors and pale shades of smell but

just

fastfastfastfastfast.


trees and boulders and dirt, no, just greenandgrayandbrown

and she's a wolf but somehow she can fly and something hot burns in her chest, sears,

scalds,

shrieks,

writhes,

destroys.


but oh damn oh damn she can't control, shejustwantstoloseallcontrolrighthere

right now

and everything is red, like blood,

like the rising sun and

a cry for mercy, a whimpering plea and a scream,

it's a scream-of rage anger madness

and spitfire insanity and oh how it kills her

slowly

from the inside

out.


heartbeats,

drums and loud and hot and cold

opposites, poison surging

i need control.

control.

control.

S T O P.


now though, oh now is when she begs and screams for the fire to come back

it's freezing, so bitterly irreversibly terrifying horrifyingly coldcoldcold

and mercy it's all gone, it's all over, but she knows,

—it will come back.


but for now she lies curled on her side,

tracing

pictures, swirls, family into the soft, slick mud

and a raindrop

falls

in.


and suddenly, there's moremoremoremore and,

she cries.


cries, oh heaven save me,

wails to the moon and begs for its white tears to fall

upon the scars on her back,

pleads for the skies but

they only cry and cannot

help.


and she's so finished and oh so broken

this little girl, the fight in her

flickers, dims, swells,

a match in an airless room

sobbing in the cold mud


so let it rain,

and let it pour,

and let the heavens heal my soul

let them wash from my mind

insanity

madness

Lord, just let me be borne on the winds of the sky

please

it's all i ask,

let me be

free.

finis


A/N: Uuuuh. Hm. Okay. So this was a weird poetic experiment that I just came up with, inspired by three things: 'when god lets my body be' by E.E. Cummings, 'The Telltale Heart' by Edgar Allen Poe, and 'paintstrokes' by the lovely fluggerbutter. I guess fluggerbutter's doc manager didn't give her shit like mine did, but it just fucked up all the paragraphs so I put lines where they would have been.

So I get that this might be weird and hard to understand, but I tried to write poetry about Red's transformation into the Wolf.

The lowercase part and total disregard for grammar was from Cummings and fluggerbutter. I was definitely trying to channel a feeling of...not caring about anything other than some primal desire, I guess.

The commas and dashes were, in my mind, strategically placed. If you've read TTH, then you know Poe varies his sentence structure to mimic a beating heart. Similarly, I tried to vary the structure so mine would mimic panting and other breathing patterns.

The spaces between the letters, like this, I tried to mimic sort of a shaky, gaspy, rattling breath.

I feel like this is going to be just a hit or miss thing with you guys. Poetry isn't my strong suit and this was just an experiment. Let me know what you think, I'm welcome to any sort of feedback you might have.